Salad dodging Minister of Housing Megan Woods, was given her job to pick up the pieces after Phil Twyford was found to have tits for hands. Since taking over things have gotten demonstrably worse:
The number of people on the waitlist for public housing reached a record high of 23,687 in March, newly released data shows.
The number has trebled in the past three years, and grew by 428 households in just one month.
Emergency motel stays have also been growing, with 5315 Kiwis staying in one during March – despite a move by the Government to start charging for them.
National’s housing spokeswoman Nicola Willis said the situation was a “disgrace” caused by spiralling rents in the private market.
“Labour is failing to provide stable housing to more than 23,000 New Zealanders in desperate need. The numbers just get worse every month. Behind the figures are families and individuals who are bearing the brunt of an underlying shortage of housing,” Willis said.
Stuff
This is precisely why Megan Woods’s office is now known in the Beehive as the “high dependency unit”. Nothing they do has the desired effect, in fact, anything they do has the opposite effect.
Even Blind Freddy knew that whacking landlords, piling on costs like heaters, fans etc, removing interest deductability and offsets, whacking on a de facto capital gains tax, and then throwing billions of dollars of cash into the marketplace would cause rents to skyrocket, especially as they’ve done absolutely nothing about the supply side of the equation.
Stuff produced a chart to show the extent of the problem, but rather dishonestly made all the bars blue. I’ve corrected the chart to more accurately reflect the problem and where the blame should lie:
Labour entered government after a long campaign on housing, telling us all they’d fix the problem. They haven’t. It has been made exponentially worse as a result of their hapless endeavours.
How much more pain from housing, and from Megan Woods’s office, is the Prime Minister prepared to take?
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